Promotion

The Promotion Mix
 A company’s total promotion mix—also called its marketing

communications mix—consists of the specific blend of
advertising, public relations, personal selling, sales
promotion, and direct-marketing tools that the company uses
to persuasively communicate customer value and build
customer relationships.
The primary roles of a service firm’s promotional strategy is to-
 Inform
 Persuade
 Remind
 Action / Purchase
Through
Non personal source: Communication channels that are
considered impersonal, such as TV advertising or printed
information.
Personal source: Communication channels that are
considered personal, such as a face-to-face encounter.
The Promotion Mix
Elements of Marketing Promotion
The are five elements of promotional mix. They are discussed
as follows:
Advertising: Any paid form of nonpersonal presentation and
promotion of ideas, goods, or services by an identified sponsor.
Sales promotion: Short-term incentives to encourage the
purchase or sale of a product or service.
Personal selling: Personal presentation by the firm’s sales
force for the purpose of making sales and building customer
relationships.
Public relations: Building good relations with the company’s
various publics by obtaining favorable publicity, building up a
good corporate image, and handling or heading off unfavorable
rumors, stories, and events.
Direct marketing: Direct connections with carefully targeted
individual consumers to both obtain an immediate response and
cultivate lasting customer relationships—the use of direct mail,
the telephone, direct-response television, e-mail, the Internet, &
other tools to communicate directly with specific consumers.
 Each category involves specific promotional tools
used to communicate with customers. For example,
advertising includes broadcast, print, Internet,
outdoor, and other forms. Sales promotion includes
discounts, coupons, displays, and demonstrations.
Personal selling includes sales presentations, trade
shows, and incentive programs. Public relations
(PR) includes press releases, sponsorships, special
events, and Web pages. And direct marketing
includes catalogs, telephone marketing, kiosks, the
Internet, mobile marketing, and more.
Major Advertising Decisions
 1. Setting Advertising Objectives: The first step is to set
advertising objectives. These objectives should be based on past
decisions about the target market, positioning, and the marketing
mix, which define the job that advertising must do in the total
marketing program. The overall advertising objective is to help
build customer relationships by communicating customer value.
Here, we discuss specific advertising objectives. An advertising
objective is a specific communication task to be accomplished
with a specific target audience during a specific period of time.
Advertising objectives can be classified by primary purpose—
whether the aim is to inform, persuade, or remind.
 2. Setting the Advertising Budget: After determining its
advertising objectives, the company next sets its advertising
budget for each product. Advertising budget is the money and
other resources allocated to a product or company advertising
program. There are four commonly used methods for setting
promotion budgets:
– Affordable method: Setting the promotion budget at the level
management thinks the company can afford.
– Percentage-of-sales method: Setting the promotion budget at a certain
percentage of current or forecasted sales or as a percentage of the unit
sales price.
– Competitive-parity method: Setting the promotion budget to match
competitors’ outlays.
– Objective-and-task method: Developing the promotion
budget by (1) defining specific objectives, (2) determining the
tasks that must be performed to achieve these objectives, and
(3) estimating the costs of performing these tasks. The sum of
these costs is the proposed promotion budget.
 3. Message Strategy: The first step in creating effective
advertising messages is to plan a message strategy—to decide
what general message will be communicated to consumers. The
purpose of advertising is to get consumers to think about or react
to the product or company in a certain way. People will react
only if they believe that they will benefit from doing so. Thus,
developing an effective message strategy begins with identifying
customer benefits that can be used as advertising appeals.
Ideally, advertising message strategy will follow directly from
the company’s broader positioning and customer value strategies.
 4. Selecting Advertising Media: The major steps in advertising
media selection are (1) deciding on reach, frequency, and impact;
(2) choosing among major media types; (3) selecting specific
media vehicles; and (4) deciding on media timing.
 5. Evaluating Advertising Effectiveness and Return on
Advertising Investment: Advertising accountability and return
on advertising investment have become hot issues for most
companies. Two separate recent studies show that advertising
effectiveness has fallen 40 percent over the past decade and that
37.3 percent of advertising budgets are wasted. This leaves top
management and many companies asking their marketing
managers, “How do we know that we’re spending the right
amount on advertising?” and “What return are we getting on
our advertising investment?”

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The Promotion Mix

 A company’s total promotion mix—also called its marketing

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